Restaurant Rantage
As you may know, Christine the Curmudgeon used to work in the restaurant biz. And, oh, do I have so many stories of stupid-assed customers. Yesterday, Kat wrote a post about batshit insane customers at Walgreen’s, and it’s inspired me to dredge up some of my own tales of dealing with stupid people.
I used to have a job cooking at The Brewpub Which Shall Remain Unnamed. Most of the customers there were cool, but we got a few real gems once in a while.
For example, the woman who came in, sat at the bar, and ordered a burger, cooked rare. Rare, to most people, is when the meat is ripped off the cow while it’s still mooing, and is cooked enough to heat it through, but still reddish-pink on the inside.
I send it out, and the bartender comes back and says that the customer wants it cooked more. So I slap it back on the grill and cook it to a perfect medium-rare.
Still not good enough. I get this burger back a few more times and cook it to medium, then to medium-well, and finally to well-done. As in, if she still didn’t like it, I could send it to the Boston Bruins to use for a hockey puck.
She was happy with the hockey puck. But sheesh, if that’s the case, then why in the blue hell did she order her burger RARE in the first place? If she honestly didn’t know of the various cooking temps, why didn’t she ask?
Since then, I’ve noticed that a lot of restaurants explain “rare”, “medium rare”, etc on the menu, so people know what they are ordering. Sheesh. If someone is that damned stupid, they need to do the world a favor and eat at home.
I am very proud of the fact that I can cook a perfect steak or burger to any requested temp, without having to stick a thermometer in it or anything. I find it a bit insulting when dumbassed customers who probably do not know how to cook try to argue with me as to what constitutes “rare”, “medium”, etc.
Another tale from the same restaurant – the family who came in with their little kid, and bitched because we did not have Wonder Bread and Kraft cheese in wrappers, to make a grilled cheese sammich that would be to the spoiled brat’s liking. Hell, not only was grilled cheese NOT on the menu, but this place didn’t even HAVE a kids menu. Maybe this was NOT the best dining choice for this family?
I kept telling the bimbo server until I was blue in the face – bread choices are whole wheat and marble rye, cheeses are Swiss, Cheddar, Provolone, and American (the latter being REAL cheese, not that individually wrapped stuff). That was IT. As far as I was concerned, they should have been grateful that I was willing to even try to make something that IS NOT ON THE DAMNED MENU in the first place!
I ended up making grilled cheese sammiches with every combination possible, every single one of them rejected by His Royal Highness. Hell, this is a BREWPUB, not Chuck-E-Cheese! We catered to ADULTS, not picky-eating spoiled brats!
I finally ran out of bread/cheese combos, and had to give up. It was disgusting as to how much food we had to toss because of this one little brat and his idiot parents. If the stupid server had just told them right off the bat what bread and cheese was available, this could have been avoided. But this was a HUGE gripe I have always had with a lot of the servers in that place, they seemed to think that I could make food, any food they asked for, magically appear on a plate, whether we had it in stock or not.
Then that server came back into the kitchen later and yelled at me because the parents of His Royal Pain-In-My-Ass left without leaving a tip. And this is MY FAULT, how? Jeez. How about NOT telling people we have something, when you don’t know if we do or not? If you don’t know, come back and ASK. And if I say, no, we don’t have Wonder bread and cheese in wrappers for the kid, then go back to the table and TELL them that. Don’t tell them that I can magically whip up anything the kid wants. If I weren’t already busy cooking up other people’s orders, I would have walked out to the table myself and reamed them a new one, made it clear once in for all what I could and could not do.
I’m just so glad to not have to deal with this crap any longer.
